new ways to make culture and discover value

We are 700!

This is the 700th post for This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.

Thank you very much to TBSA readers for their 3729 comments and many off line encouragements. I once heard someone say that TBSA had the smartest readers in the blogosphere. I believe this is true.

Other stats:

There are now around 800,000 words in 700 posts.

According to Technorati, there are 2328 links from 368 blogs.

Thanks very much to everyone who has participated with great comments, questions, and challenges.

Normally, when TBSA reaches a milestone, I ask visitors to keep their ticket stubs and claim a free beverage (medium) of their choice in the lobby. Mrs. Burton has been rethinking the "whole idea" of "sugary drinks" and Pomegranate juice will be served instead. We are deeply sorry.

Oh, and thanks to BusinessWeek Online for their attention and these kind words:

WHY READ ITBecause Grant McCracken — an anthropologist and corporate ethnography consultant — is witty, opinionated, and razor sharp. "This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics," he announces to his readers. And it does. His posts filter marketing and commerce through a cultural lens and vice versa. In the process, he offers smart takes on everything from "chunky" markets (the growth in the audience that lies between mass consumers and "long tail" niches) to the branding quandary Apple (AAPL ) faced when it put Intel (INTC ) chips into its Macs.

Another thought, Grant: By your books, your work and now this blog, you yourself are leading the creation of a new, particular society with its own culture and economy.

It’s not simply that we who are interested in the topics you focus on here all existed in solitude beforehand, and you have connected us together with your blog. It is more than this. It is that not all of us even knew we were interested in these topics, or that we had any relevant skills and insights to bear on them, until your books and especially your blog came along.

I think a lot of the talk about Web2.0 implicitly views the web as connecting together static dots, which somehow pre-exist their web connection. Rather, the power of the web is to bring those dots into existence simultaneously with connecting them together.